


Same As It Ever Was

by Dragonite_Postal_Service



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Friendship, Future Foundation (Dangan Ronpa), Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Multi, Not Beta Read, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Romance, Unreliable Narrator, Virtual Reality, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 06:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21423943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonite_Postal_Service/pseuds/Dragonite_Postal_Service
Summary: Danganronpa is over... isn’t it?Shuichi Saihara awakes in a hospital bed and just like that, the world is turned upside down.Dead friends are alive, fiction becomes reality, and sixteen formerly missing people find a home again.
Relationships: Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	Same As It Ever Was

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest... I have very little to say. As someone who greatly disliked V3’s ending initially (now I respect the power of that kind of ending and see why it’s strong, but would still want to see the characters live a different life) I wanted to rework it, so here we are. 
> 
> Maybe it’s exhaustion from all the writing or a lack of confidence, but I have very few comments on the first chapter. I’d like to see responses and thoughts before I say much else.
> 
> Enjoy the story, and I hope I can continue work on it in the future!

His foot crossing the threshold was all he could remember. Sunlight, real and brilliant, warming his still-trembling body. Yumeno and Harukawa’s hands in his as they moved together, beyond the rubble and to the gaping hole in the once convincing fake horizon. Smoke stinging his nostrils as the dust of the explosion slowly settled. His heart, pounding hard, lingering closer to his throat than its right place in his chest. The very moment he and his surviving friends had left the world of fiction behind, and then...

Nothing. 

If his memory was a book, from there, the pages had been crudely torn out. Not one recollection remained, and not one resurfaced, no matter how much time he painstakingly mulled it over. And in the dark room he was left alone in, mulling things over was all he had to do. 

Shuichi Saihara, once an obsessive fan of the Danganronpa series and now but the smoldering husk of the fictional identity he’d been left to cling to, did nothing but think as he laid still in the cot he never recalled getting into. 

While he had once thought that remaining a moment longer in the disintegrating dome that once held that damnable killing game would be the worst outcome for him, Saihara had to concede, being alone with his thoughts might have been just as bad. The sudden loss of his memories and the persistent question of just where he was were stressful enough to dwell on, but they were nothing compared to the memories of the killing game. They reared their ugly heads at the worst times. Just when Saihara could feel his breathing finally still, and his eyelids sag in anticipation of much needed rest, the bloody memories would rush to the forefront of his mind. Even when he wasn’t plagued by nonstop reminders of how each of his friends had ended up mangled, bloodied and mutilated, every earth-shattering truth he had learned in that final trial was there to shake his core.

Those videos of him, Momota and Akamatsu... they were the worst of all. Those malicious, crazed glints in their eyes as they spoke such chilling words to the camera with wide smiles on their faces—it came back, each time he closed his eyes. 

Saihara was tired of reminders. He wasn’t real. Nothing was real. Their struggle wasn’t real. 

All he could do was lay in that cot with his face pressed into the one pillow he was provided. The mere hours that had gone by felt like days. Only one sound kept him company in this lonely, dim room, and that was the steady beeps of the nearby heart-rate-monitor.

At the sound of the monitor when he had first awoken, Saihara had assumed he was in a hospital of some kind. But as consciousness returned to him and the world slowly expanded to more than what was just at his bedside, that explanation seemed impossible. The room was that sterile hospital white, sure, but completely barren otherwise. No windows, curtains, other beds, or any other medicinal equipment beyond the monitor were to be found. Either this was the most ill-prepared hospital he had ever seen, or Saihara’s initial assumption was completely off base. 

And now he sat, wrestling with a thousand different thoughts as he stared solemnly up at the tile ceiling. Would staying put in this room really be okay? At the same time... Saihara could not yet be sure if he was ready to face the real world that waited just beyond the room’s featureless, white door. Conflicted, he remained motionless in bed, occasionally flexing his fingers and toes to remind himself that he was, indeed, in control of his own body. 

When the door suddenly squealed on its hinges, Saihara’s head shot straight up. As light from the hallway began to flood into the room with each inch the door was cracked open, the danger of the situation finally settled in. Sitting alone with his thoughts for so long, he had nearly forgotten the living hell he was technically still on the run from... 

Tensing his muscles as a silhouette came into view, he prepared himself to make a run for it. He silently prayed that wherever Harukawa and Yumeno were, they could make it to safety, too. 

The man who entered did so with no urgency, casually peering inside, glassy green eyes widening as they locked with Saihara’s. 

“Oh, oh, you’re awake—“

“Where am I? Who are you?” Fictional character be damned, Saihara’s talent as a detective was plenty real to him, and it was time to put those skills back to use. 

Sensing the venom in his voice, his visitor raised his hands defensively and stepped further in. As the light from the hall illuminated his surprisingly youthful, even adorable features, the thick tension in the room seemed to dissipate. Saihara’s eyes narrowed, perplexed. In spite of his official-looking suit, this man—no, this _boy_—appeared remarkably close to Saihara in age. And... familiar...

Memories of the simulation came flooding back as Saihara stared him down. He gulped, a rock of anxiety slowly crawling down his throat and settling uneasily in his gut. He _was_ familiar! Shirogane’s cosplays of Danganronpa characters... this boy’s likeness was among them, right? Same eyes, short stature, hair color and style...

A Team Danganronpa member? An actor, perhaps? The tension returned in spades and Saihara began to hoist himself from the mattress. 

“Let me go,” he demanded before his first questions could be answered. “You’re with Team Danganronpa. Let me go.”

The boy’s brow creased in confusion. “Team Dangan—“

“Don’t... don’t play dumb! Stop pretending you don’t know!” The hours of stewing over his thoughts he had finally bore a result, a white-hot fury as every memory of that wicked game flashed before his eyes. “When will it be enough?! I played your killing game! Whatever deal I made with you, cancel it! Forget it! I never want another thing to do with Danganronpa! Never!”

Saihara took in ragged, shallow breaths, knuckles turning white as they unconsciously clenched the sheets of the cot. His visitor seemed to be regarding him with genuine fear now, one hand hesitantly hovering above the doorknob. 

Good. Such fear was incomparable to the dread that had plagued Saihara each day in that horrible game, but it satisfied him regardless to see any member of Team Danganronpa reel back in terror. 

“I’m sorry, Saihara,” the boy spoke, peering hesitantly from behind his hands. “I-I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I don’t know what that simulation showed you, but I’ve _never_ heard of any ‘Team Danganronpa’ before. It’s a bit jarring, I know, but—“

“Simulation?”

Saihara’s heart leapt into his throat. Part of him remained insistent on distrusting this strange individual, but another screamed even louder to drop his guard for just a moment, just to hear his story, even if it was likely untrue. A simulation... that word lingered in his thoughts, the tantalizing prospect that it was. Simulation, that could mean the killing game was never actually real, right? Were people... still alive? 

Desperation to see all the friends he had so painfully lost immediately overrode any remaining caution. 

“Yes, simulation. I suppose there’s a lot of explaining I need to do...” a genuinely sorrowful look flickered across the suited teen’s face. “I don’t think you remember.”

“Remember what?” The lack of direct answers was starting to flare Saihara’s temper.

He usually was never this fast to anger... cold fear clasped at his heart as the images of the deranged fanboy he had once been flooded to the forefront of his mind. Was that old self coming back, now that he was freed from the game?

The thought alone was enough to nauseate him. 

“My name is Makoto Naegi,” the boy, “Naegi”, extended a hand. “Future Foundation, fourteenth division.”

Reluctantly, Saihara shook the hand he had been presented, but said nothing in reply. 

“Future Foundation”... that, too, was a part of the Danganronpa universe, was it not? Vague memories of the flickering of flashback lights and aged hardcover accounts seemed to corroborate such an idea. Some organization that was against the Super High School-Level Despairs, right? 

This was the story he had been told in the fictitious world of Danganronpa. But Danganronpa, and anything to do with it, was just that... fiction. Fiction, fiction, fiction, fiction. All fiction! There was no Hope’s Peak, no Super High School-Level students, nor Super High School-Level Despairs, and certainly not a Future Foundation meant to fight them. Saihara’s senses screamed every course of action imaginable at him. Run, knock “Naegi”’s lights out, fight back, deny his claims, anything...! 

Either something was incredibly wrong, beyond even his own understanding of the word, or Team Danganronpa was sadistic enough to keep messing with his psyche even now. His head throbbed, bouncing between each possibility. 

Hope that it was all an elaborate lie... or the despair settling in as he realized the living hell had yet to end. 

“May I...?” Naegi motioned to the edge of the cot, taking a hesitant step back into the room. 

Deciding to bite the bullet and throw all caution to the wind, Saihara nodded. 

Naegi sat, the thin mattress dipping considerably with his added weight. His eyes darted about and a few droplets of sweat snaked their way down his face. Alarm bells were blaring in Saihara’s head, but as long as the smallest possibility existed that what he was about to hear was, in fact, not fiction, muffled the sirens.

“A good section of the Future Foundation’s sixth division disappeared two months ago,” Naegi finally began. “Do you remember the Future Foundation?”

“I remember what Team Danganronpa taught me about them,” Came Saihara’s reply, the detective electing to ignore the look of confusion on Naegi’s face. “The group who was founded to fight despair... you were the ‘good guys’ of Danganronpa.”

“R-Right. Well... that’s sort of right. I still don’t know anything about this ‘Danganronpa’, but you’re right. We were founded with the purpose to fight despair. I don’t know about calling us the ‘good guys’, though. I’ll be the first to admit the Future Foundation has a really... questionable history. Our past isn’t the prettiest.” 

The chestnut-haired boy awkwardly cleared his throat. “A-ah, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Saihara gave a sigh of relief, grateful he was making an effort to get to the point.

“The Future Foundation is separated into divisions, each with a different task to perform. Since the death of Junko Enoshima and the reforming of her Remnants of Despair— uh, do you remember that stuff?”

Saihara gave a halfhearted nod. The information he had found back in the killing game was altogether rather bare-bones and nondescript, but those were names he had come across.

“Okay, that should make explaining go a bit faster, then. Like I was saying, since that happened, despair has lost a great deal of power, and the Foundation really doesn’t need to operate at the rate it used to. The world is drifting back to peace, and the Future Foundation has taken that as the queue to step back. Not to say we’ve completely disbanded—there’s always work to still be done while the dust is setting. And that’s where I get back to those divisions I mentioned earlier.”

Naegi met Saihara’s eyes with uncertainty, checking if he was still listening. Saihara nodded slowly, his head spinning as he worked to properly register all of the information.

“My division, the fourteenth division, is responsible for public relations. Others are responsible for restoring infrastructure, proving food and other resources, rescue operations for survivors... the list goes on. But every branch is important for the functionality of the Foundation as a whole! That was why the incidents that started up two weeks after the founding of the new Hope’s Peak Academy were major emergencies. Entire groups of division members were suddenly vanishing left and right, and the second Future Foundation members starting disappearing, suddenly, more Remnants of Despair we hadn’t known of started showing up, just like that.”

One topic had clung to Saihara’s mind. The thought refused to leave him, and the desire for an answer overpowered even his own will to listen as the explanation went on. 

“—That ‘new’ Hope’s Peak Academy.”

Naegi met his gaze tentatively. 

“Did I ever attend there?”

Naegi wasted no time in providing this answer. 

“...No.”

“Really?”

Saihara’s eyes narrowed, fingers clawing anxiously into the sheets. So _some_of his life really was fictitious? What did Team Danganronpa have to gain from picking and choosing information like that? Ironically, the more Naegi explained, the less sense it all made. What a mess.

“My class was the last one to attend Hope’s Peak before the Tragedy. After the Killing School Life passed and I joined the Future Foundation, you had already been there for a while, I think...?”

“Wait, what?” Saihara held out a hand, signaling him to stop talking. “I was in the Future Foundation before you?” 

“Right!” Naegi slapped his forehead. “I’m sorry, that was what I’ve been trying to get at...”

“Though not all of the missing Future Foundation members were found, we tried our hardest to recover as many people as possible. Of the missing people we could find, they were hidden away in remote locations, all unconscious and plugged into massive computers. Computers that were running a killing game simulation. For most of the ones we’d found, they’d either completely fallen into despair or were teetering on the edge. We even lost a few who ran off to join the side of Despair that we weren’t able to catch. With Future Foundation members suddenly joining the ranks of Despair, their forces gained traction again, and things were getting ugly. But for the most part, after the initial kidnappings, we’ve tightened tracking on Foundation members and protection of patrol groups. It seemed like that was stopping the abductions—for a while.”

Saihara leaned forward, closer to Naegi. 

“Three months ago, sixteen members of the sixth division vanished just like that. We couldn’t have lost a chunk of a more important division. Even though there aren’t wild riots and Monokuma attacks like there used to be, that policing department is still slammed with work just trying to uphold peace. Losing that many people was a huge hit to us, but thanks to the kidnappings from before, we had an idea of what was going on and started plotting out ideas for searches before we were too late.”

“What then?”

“We found where they were being held. The basement of an old high school near Osaka that was abandoned during the Tragedy. We probably wouldn’t have found anyone if it wasn’t for the fact that someone actually heard _you_ calling out in one of the halls.”

Saihara’s jaw dropped. “I...”

“Do you remember the basement? Waking up? Any of the machinery you saw, or the people who rescued you?”

“No. I left the academy, and ended up here. That’s it. I’m sure I would remember something like that.” His olive eyes narrowed. 

That missing piece of memory could not be just a coincidence. If anything was being hidden from him, which Saihara was almost certain there was, he would find it in whatever he had forgotten after “waking up”. 

“I can tell that whatever you’ve seen in the simulation has made it hard to believe me,” Naegi’s voice quivered behind his professional demeanor. “But trust me, please. Believing whatever you saw in there will be playing right into the despair’s trap.”

If he had learned anything in the killing game, it was that nothing should be taken at face value. And though his heart soared at the idea that he, Shuichi Saihara, was really the Super High School-Level Detective, his existence and everyone else’s’ was never an elaborate fiction woven by Team Danganronpa, and no one had died...

The realist in him could do nothing but doubt it. This was beyond too good to be true. 

“I bet this is a lot to take in. No... I know it must be. Saihara... ask me any questions you want,” Naegi leaned back, an uncomfortably crooked smile forcing itself onto his face as some kind of welcoming gesture. “Nothing held back.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” The question immediately spilled from the detective’s mouth like vomit.

Naegi sucked in a sharp breath, gaze drifting up to the ceiling as he contemplated the question. 

Red flag, red flag. His hesitation was doing nothing to ease Saihara’s paranoia. 

“...I can’t say there’s a lot I can do to prove I’m trustworthy,” Naegi finally spoke up. “Other than just, well, saying I’m telling the truth. I suppose you could look outside or walk around the compound for a while, but...”

“Anything can be faked,” Saihara interjected.

When Naegi frowned at him, eyes narrowed in confusion, he had no choice but to elaborate.

“You... just...” the words caught in his throat. “You have no idea what I’ve seen. After everything, I... I can’t even begin to trust you.”

“That’s okay. I don’t expect you to. Like I said, I don’t know what you exactly saw in that simulation, but whatever it was gave you reason enough to be this doubtful. I know what it’s like. Despair has its tricks.”

Saihara fumed internally. Naegi was being so reasonable, understanding, so _good_ to him. His speech, it was so... frustratingly sincere! So frustratingly sincere, there was no way it could real! A small part of the detective truly did want to trust him, and that thought only deepened his exasperation. Damn it, this was clearly another trap! Team Danganronpa had decided they had not had enough of tormenting him. This was a ploy, and it was no situation to throw trust around so liberally...

He flopped onto his back, sinking into the thin cushioning of the single shoddy pillow the cot had. A defeated huff was forced from his lungs upon landing. His eyes fixed on the white tile of the ceiling, his mind in turn fixing on the idea of shoving all of his conflicting thoughts aside and becoming all but dead to the world. 

Why could nothing ever be simple?

“...Do you need some time to yourself?”

Saihara grunted affirmatively, wrapping the flimsy pillow around his face. He waited in silence for the click of the closing door, ready to process the mountain of information he was still grappling with. 

That had been the plan, but within minutes of Naegi leaving, Saihara’s eyelids grew unbearably heavy. In spite of his intentions, sleep claimed him in his already shaken mental state. Though answers were what he needed to gain even a semblance of peace of mind, sleep seemed all the more appealing. Deciding that he needed to shut down for some time to properly think things through, Saihara stopped his fight against the urge to sleep and let himself slip off into the calmer world of unconsciousness.

**Author's Note:**

> All the exposition was incredibly painful to write and I’m just glad this chapter is over and done so I can get to the actual action!


End file.
